1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an apparatus and a method for diagnosing abnormal conditions which are based on a sequential diagnosis technique and Boolean logic between abnormal conditions in order to diagnose abnormal conditions of complicated systems such as a nuclear power plant, a petroleum/chemical factory or the like using a computer and are usable even under an advanced control environment.
2. Description of the Related Art
In order to secure the safety of a large scale complicated system such as a nuclear power plant or the like, a prompt and exact diagnosis must be undertaken when the system is in conditions deviated from the normal (hereinafter, referred to as the abnormal conditions).
Based on such importance, various diagnosis techniques and diagnosis systems have been studied and developed.
However, since most of the diagnosis techniques have very complicated theoretical concepts and need excessive time and costs for accomplishing such a diagnosis system, an effective technique that is helpful to develop the practical diagnosis system is very limited.
Among diagnosis techniques actually applied up to now, the most widely used diagnosis technique is a sequential diagnosis technique capable of proposing a binary tree which can diagnose abnormal conditions through sequential experiments.
The advantage of this technique is to effectively determine the sequence of abnormal symptoms that should be checked to diagnose the abnormal conditions. However, since the existing sequential diagnosis technique has not considered Boolean logic (AND or OR relationship), it is expected that the correct picture of abnormal symptoms could be distorted due to various reasons such as masking effects or interactions caused by the interlocks of complicated systems.
Owing to such disadvantages, not only the amounts of time and effort taken in diagnosing the abnormal conditions are increased but also the user is highly likely to obtain an improper diagnosis. In order to solve such problems, there has been developed a technique capable of considering Boolean logic between abnormal symptoms in the existing sequential diagnosis technique (Korean Patent Registration No. 10-0531033 B1, Nov. 18, 2005).
However, the technique developed in the patent considers acquisition difficulties according to abnormal symptoms to be the same. Accordingly, the technique can be used only under the conventional control environment where all of a controller, an alarm tile, an indicator and the like are displayed at the same physical level, as shown in FIG. 1.
Owing to such problems, there has been a difficulty in applying the technique developed by the patent, since the acquisition difficulties of each abnormal symptom are not the same under an advanced control environment which has been gradually increased with the development of IT techniques as shown in FIG. 2. That is, under a control environment where measuring devices such as a controller, an alarm tile, an indicator and the like are provided on various layers of a computer screen using software.
In other words, in the advanced control environment, there may be differences in the acquisition difficulties of necessary information according to the screen configuration.
For example, if too many entities are displayed on a single screen or there are colors, flashing lights or the like on the screen, then it is strongly expected that the user feel a higher demand due to the acquisition difficulty of information.